With the advent of e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C), procurement processes are being moved to the Internet platform for increased speed, widespread reach and efficiency. The Internet provides an optimum forum for accessing and broadcasting a large number of business suppliers and resellers to potential buyers.
Historically, manufacturers and resellers have offered their products in stores. With the advent of e-commerce, the concept of store also finds an extension in the online world, whereby a manufacturer or reseller creates a “virtual store” for conducting its business and allow buyers to purchase or exchange goods or services. These online stores offer a compelling shopping experience for the buyers, and as a result, manufacturers and resellers go through great lengths to ensure that the content of their online business accurately reflects the quantity and quality of the products or services offered.
E-commerce related transactions are typically based on a client/server paradigm 100 as shown in FIG. 1. As understood in the art, the client/server is an architecture in which a client machine 102 (such as a workstation, personal computer, personal digital assistant, cellular phone, etc.) is the requesting machine and an application server 104 is the supplying machine, both of which are interconnected by way of a network 108. The application server 104 is a server computer and includes one or more programs that provide the logic for an online or automated application, and is typically part of a larger, distributed computing system. Application servers 104 are often modeled as a component of a three-tier system which includes a graphical user interface (GUI) server, an application or business logic server, and a resource manager 110 for accessing data stored in databases 106. One such application server 104 is the WebSphere™ product from International Business Machines (IBM). WebSphere™ is available for a number of platforms, including computers from personal computers to high-end main frames running operating systems ranging from Microsoft Windows NT™, to IBM's AIX™, to the open source Linux.
In a typical e-commerce transaction, the client 102 requesting a store operation such as product catalog information interacts with the application server 104 that contains the business logic for synchronizing and managing access to the requested information located at one or more of the databases 106. The clients 102 communicate with the application server 104 through network 108. The network 108 may be an intranet, or the Internet, depending upon the intended geographical reach of the system. The interface (not shown) between the application server 104 and the resource manager 110 may also be an intranet, the Internet, or any other type of proprietary network.
The resource manager 110 stores and retrieves information relating to the store operation on the databases 106 and forwards the requested data from the databases 106 to the application server 104 for further processing, and eventually to the clients 102. The databases 106 are generally co-located with the resource manager 110, and serve as archives of store operation information such as catalogs, product specifications, price lists, product availability and similar types of data typically requisitioned by one of the clients 102.
Frequently, a single virtual store is not sufficient by itself to capture all the go-to-market strategies of a business concern. For instance, a company may have different lines of wares or services, each targeting a different market segment. Also, a company may cross-sell products available by another company, or may share inventory with other stores. As a result, different stores are needed to cater to different marketplaces.
To address these problems, various marketplaces are set up, each comprising a number of stores serving as gathering place of sellers having or offering wares or services. A marketplace may be presented in its entirety as a single domain, with possible divisions between stores. The marketplace home page may include a group of hyperlinks to various store pages, which in turn provide hyperlinks to wares or services offered by each store. The stores may be located on different domain names, and their content may be stored in separate databases.
Regardless of the number of virtual stores or the diversity of the content, from a data management point of view, it is important to ensure that the stores share the same infrastructure so that the same tools can be used to manage the shared and non-shared content among the various stores. However, a major difficulty in existing e-commerce systems is that the stores are typically operated by independently different manufacturers or resellers and use various proprietary protocols, while additional protocols are also being defined by several industry consortia.
Various solutions have been proposed to improve managing and sharing of content and services amongst various stores. A variety of techniques have been proposed in which specific content, such as advertisement, is delivered to a specific audience as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,636,346, 6,009,410 and 6,182,050. Other techniques involving the scheduling and delivery of advertisements are also described, for example in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,105,184, 5,937,392, 5,999,912, 6,009,409, 6,026,371 and 6,029,045.
However, the existing solutions are generally not platform-neutral or vendor-neutral, making participation by all resellers in a marketplace impossible. Moreover, the existing solutions are difficult to implement and not all resellers may have the resources required for delivery of tailor-made content on their virtual stores.